• January 1st
  
  • With the first sunrise of the new year, a wave of violet light sweeps the globe, touching each country as the light of the sun meets the land. It is invisible to cameras and doesn't disturb wildlife - only mankind notices, and they see the purplish light even in their dreams when they're not awake. This event becomes known as the Violet Dawn.
  • Immediately, governments enforce a coerced silence on media corporations and try to stifle the news while their intelligence agencies figure out what exactly happened.
• January 3rd
  
  
  
  • A significant portion of the world’s population suddenly manifest magical abilities. The vast majority of these tragic individuals are either killed by the uncontrollable manifestation of their vast power, or driven irrevocably and unintelligibly insane - and are subsequently lethally subdued by riot police and government response.
  • Very few of what were eventually called The First Wave were taken alive; those that were, disappeared completely. It is likely that their citizenships were revoked, and that they remained in state custody until their deaths in captivity.
  • It is unknown if any 1st Generation Mages survive in the wild, but estimates are that less than a handful possibly could - and that less than a half could still possibly be serviceably sane. The events of this period will come to be known, one day, as the first World Wide Witchhunt.

• January 1st
  
  
  
  • It happens again. Like a flashback to a nightmare, the public find themselves once again the subject of a wave of Violet light, washing over them like an occult tide with the rising of the sun. The world watches in horror… and waits in dread.
• January 3rd
  
  • The Second Wave awaken, and much like the first one they are either so wildly out of control of their powers that they are killed by them, publicly, or they are mentally destroyed by the weight of their new abilities. The government respond as they did before - with gunfire and Witchhunts. The position of the agencies created to deal with The First Wave is now secure; these are the forefather agencies of the modern institutions dedicated to hunting magicians - and accordingly, the second World Wide Witchhunt commences. A few more magicians from this era survive the bloodshed, but not many. Never many.
• April 20th
  
  • The Stafford Act - informally known as the Inquisition act - is passed by the UK parliament and subsequently taken up by the European Parliament as well. It formalises the cancellation of Brexit and the beginning of global intelligence cooperation to counter the Magical Threat. Mages are not quite universally seen as an enemy of civilisation as a whole, yet, but the public are terrified.

• January 1st-3rd
  
  • The Third Wave are expected to follow this year’s Violet Dawn by the FOE, and by the wider antimagic intelligence community - but they expected it to be different, more chaotic, more violent. The magicians of the Third Generation are instead like something more subtly deranged, like a failed experiment. For this reason, many of them survive, at least initially. Their hallucinations and delusions will eventually lead most of them to be captured nonetheless, but in the meantime they remain the most survivable Generation yet.
• February 4th
  
  • The disparate branches and divisions of existing national intelligence agencies - the FBI Unusual Affairs branch, the CIA’s Extraordinary Intelligence Committee, the NSA’s Paranormal Task Force, MI5’s Crowley Office… - are formally dissolved and recondensed into their own institutions of investigation, by almost unanimous votes in nearly every sovereign nation in the world. This is the birthday of the European Magical Defence Agency, with the birthday of the Federal Occult Enforcement group coming the next day on the 5th of February.
• September 24th
  
  • The Magician known as Cam, a talented and reasonably stable individual of the third generation, develops their abilities and is eventually able to identify individuals with latent magical potential. They immediately begin using this ability to try and find themselves some friends.
• December 25th
  
  • Cam succeeds in finding seven others who are due to awaken after the next Violet Dawn. Knowing that they will not be able to reveal themselves until they too have self-identified as Magicians, Cam puts measures in place to protect them, and waits for the Sunrise on New Year’s Morning.

• January 1st-3rd
  
  • As is now the broadly accepted pattern, on New Year’s morning the world is once again bathed by the Violet Dawn, and once again another fraction of the population is awoken. This year’s magicians are the most stable yet, 90% or so of them remaining both bodily and mentally intact. Intelligence agencies scramble to capture them, using new - if primitive - magic-sensing devices developed covertly using captured mages to test on; they are moderately successful, but for the first time most of the awakened Fourth Generation remain free past the first month mark.
  • Cam is successful in liberating four of the seven - the FOE were already too close to the other three - and bringing them together in Brightwell, Illinois. This is where they will, in the coming weeks, become the founders of the Violet Underground.

• January 1st
  
  • The Violet Dawn arrives once more.
• January 3rd
  
  • You Awaken as a part of the Fifth Generation.
  • Three minutes after the Dawn, you get a text from an unknown number, telling you that FOE will be knocking on your door in fifteen minutes, and that you need to leave your apartment by the back entrance and meet them in a nearby alleyway if you want to live. The text is brief, but apologetic - and you probably don’t have any better options anyway.
  • After a narrow escape from the FOE, you settle down into the sprawling abandoned mall complex of Goodnight, one of the hold-outs for the Violet Underground post-Dawn as survivors are grouped up, examined and sent out to different locations to hide.

In the year 2016,

the sunrise on New Year's Morning came accompanied by a flash of purplish light, travelling the world as the sun appeared for the first time of the year, meeting the eyes and minds of each human being as and when their New Year began. No person, whether they were awake or asleep, blind or sighted, above or under ground, missed it; the light - present one moment and absent the next - touched even the most remote of dreams. It was not visible on camera, not recorded by light sensors, and no wildlife reacted to it.

For forty seven hours the media tried to suppress this, under orders from the governments of the planet Earth to prevent public disturbance while intelligence agencies and research departments conducted an investigation - but rumours have a life all their own, and do not die easily.

In the 48th hour, these rumours bore fruit; the First Wave of magicians were born, created, or awoken. The silence broke like glass. These firstmade of the new age, all of them ordinary people with ordinary lives, some of them still children... were chaotic. Magic tore most of their minds or bodies asunder, dismembering one or the other in extremely violent and terrifying displays of frequently public power. Most of them died either at the hands of their own uncontrollable powers, burning up like motes of magnesium in the dark of the world, or at the hands of the police response. The few that survived are either in the captivity of the state with their citizenships revoked and their rights nonexistent, or frantically fleeing persecution and extermination. It is estimated that only a handful could possibly be left in the wild, less than half of them still sane.

The states of almost every sovereign nation in the world launched their counteroffensive almost immediately, rounding up suspected magicians and either interning them permanently or disappearing them entirely, as the first World Wide Witchhunt began. Geopolitics began to shift dramatically as the responses of different governments drove old alliances apart and bitter enemies together - the European Union saw motions for the creation of an EU-wide military wing almost immediately in their parliament, the United Kingdom's ambitions of brexit were utterly abandoned in favour the safety provided by European intelligence cooperation; the USA became more divided than ever, and the Middle Eastern countries began calling for unity. Russia didn't change a whole lot apart from the expansion of the role of the FSB and further reductions of privacy rights for civilians.

Then, just when people were confident that normality might still be restored, just when the police were standing down, it happened again.

On the very next New Year’s Morning, another wave of Violet, washing the land and kissing the sky with its unseemly affect… and another wave of mages, all exactly one year after the first.

The second wave were more stable, but not by a lot. The government was more ready for it this time, having created special investigative task forces in advance – the forefathers of the Federal Occult Enforcement agency and other such organisations. When people began randomly manifesting their powers, they were still chaotic and dangerous, and the sheer weight of magic upon a person’s mind did indeed crush some of them… but they were more stable. There are more survivors from this generation, as a result, even if they are still rare creatures.

The Third Generation of mages, once again accompanied by a Violet Dawn on New Year’s morning, were something like a failed experiment - but in a slightly different way. They generally did not fall victim to the mentally crushing influence of the colours of magic, nor did they find their powers totally uncontrollable – instead, many of these magicians began to hallucinate in the weeks after their awakening. Some of them started holding séance-like conversations with invisible beings outside of normal perception, some of them started obsessively documenting events in the past that had never happened, but whose effects could still be felt, and some of them retreated into the wilderness more or less permanently. Their prime unifying factor is the potentially delusional belief that their abilities make them a part of something larger, some greater purpose – a trait that 90% of all 3rd Wave mages captured by the government shared, at least before they expired in captivity.

It was at this point that the national governments of the world made the decision to formalise their anti-magic agencies and outlaw the practice of magic. These bills were passed by parliaments and congresses almost unanimously in almost every sovereign nation of the world, and led to the formation of the F.O.E. in America, the European Magical Defence Agency for the EU, and several less well known agencies world over. For the most part, these organisations are willing to share intelligence on suspected magic users, and have worked together to identify families or bloodlines where magic has been noted as particularly strong. Their cooperation allowed them to develop mundane means of detecting magic, and identify particular countermeasures, which all in all really should have meant that they were more prepared for the Fourth Wave than they actually were.

When the Fourth Wave happened in 2019 martial law was declared in major cities worldwide as a means of preparing, and squads of FOE troops went roving the country equipped with the primitive arcane detection equipment their quartermaster divisions had developed – but it seemed like nothing was going to happen. Instead of raving lunatics and violent psychopaths, the magicians of the fourth generation were normal people who remained largely psychologically unaffected, and were able to hide their condition long enough to make it past the initial days of the inquisition against them. Some of them were still caught and killed – or worse – but for the first time, the majority of mages went free, even if they had to leave their lives behind to do so.

It was in the months following the Fourth Wave that the Violet Underground was born.

With the government floundering to round up the suddenly invisible magician population, one of the rare, at least broadly sane Third Generation magicians decided that if Mages were going to keep appearing and the state was going to keep murdering them, something ought to exist to prevent it. After painstaking research and a good deal of stalking, the magician known as Cam was able to put themselves in contact with four other Fourth Generation mages, and form an organisation dedicated to ensuring the survival of their kind. To reflect the colour of their breed’s first dawn, it was named – informally – the Violet Underground.

The Violet Underground set about recruiting more magicians immediately after the magician known as Cam was able to put themselves in contact with several other fourth generation mages before their magic manifested, and the organisation quickly snowballed. In total, there are a couple thousand fully fledged members across the US, with a few hundred more in other continents – and many more associates beyond that, both mundane and magical. They knew they could not escape the notice of FOE for long, but were determined nonetheless to prepare for the next wave – and magic was going to help them.

Using their powers they were able to work on identifying those people who had the spark of magic living in their souls prior to the day they awakened, and they started trying to protect them as discreetly as they could while still dodging the influence of the FOE.

They were met with mixed success, their fortunes rising and falling like leaves on a purple wind. Matters were not helped by the deteriorating condition of their founder and most powerful member, Cam.

---

The Violet Underground is a largely informal organisation, which depends more on experience and seniority than any particular system of rank - although at the metaphorical top of the chain of command there is a council of founders and elder members, upon whom the burden of leadership rests. By the time of the Fifth Wave there are five council members, and Cam is no longer among them. The purpose of the organisation is to protect and defend magicians from public persecution, and to this end most cells will support mages even if they do not want to become actively involved with the VU - though they do so at their own discretion.

Although command is very rarely given to an individual, the VU do have a structure of sorts to their operations - these are not hard specific groups, as much as they are peculiar subcultures that have formed around the roles adopted by different members of the Underground, but the organisation can be roughly divided as so:

Cells and General Members:
First and foremost, they rely on the general membership for action. The active members of the VU are divided by convenience and locality into cells, which operate semi-autonomously to surveil their home areas for both FOE activity and others with magical ability or potential. These members of the Violet Underground are flexible but without specialisation, and their specific roles will often vary depending on their location and the needs of the wider organisation at the time. Apart from surveillance they will often also be the ones performing disruptive activities, gathering basic resources, and - most importantly - sheltering new recruits, or those who do not wish to take an active part in the struggle. When they are called upon, they are also the most reliable group for providing force and power, by mere merit of their magical powers.

The Free Agents:
Occasionally considered to be the next step up from the general membership of the Violet Underground are the Free Agents; a group of smugglers, criminals, spies, and otherwise specialised individuals who have - either by proving themselves as general members, or by merit of an interesting background and skillset - been recruited by the VU as specialist agents. The roles of this loose group of delocalised freeroamers are myriad and highly varied - some of them work best as spies, infiltrating law enforcement and other social institutions, whereas some others work best as smugglers or thieves - but their unifying factor is that they are highly mobile and extremely difficult to catch. They will operate either alone, in pairs, or in small groups, and can generally be asked to do anything that an individual cell can’t do alone or can’t do at all. They are an applied force, targeting any specific objectives that they are given and completing them like a mission. Many in the VU look up to them - but the less naive do their best not to get attached to Free Agents; it is usually only a matter of time before they are killed, or worse.

The Academics:
A curious group of pseudo-academics and intellectuals who see magic not simply as a tool for survival or a weapon to use, but an entire field of study. Their work often sees poor results if any, and the risks of their vocations are fiercely debated as outweighing the benefits - but they are also usually the most powerful and trained mages in the Underground, by merit of having little else to do but practice magic. When it comes to practical applications, Academics are also usually the magicians best entrusted with performing ritual magic or enchanting items, making them a sort of bizarre R&D department on top of their ‘scientific’ role. On top of this, the Academics are where you will find the majority of those magicians who believed in Cam and… whatever it was they were up to. These are the magicians who best specialise in the study of History, and Histories. You will frequently find that Academics were either genuine researchers, the more reasonable kind of conspiracy theorists, or actual believers (and ‘practitioners’) of the Occult, before they awoke.

The Bootleggers:
Though they have a mixed domain and a grey area with the Free Agents, given their overlap of skills and roles, the Bootleggers truly do deserve their own mention; these are the people who deliver your food, who smuggle you medicine, and who hide your friends. They are as vital to the Violet Underground as blood is to a body, and are responsible for the maintenance and flexibility of the logistics and supply lines that allow the continued operation of the movement. If a particular cell cannot find their own food or make their own money, and needs to draw upon the resources of the wider Underground, then it will be these people they turn to. Another interesting facet of their existence is that - although the majority by far of the Violet Underground are mages - the Bootleggers are possibly tied with the Free Agents for the highest number of mundane members. Bootleggers are big travelers, crossing entire countries on a regular basis even without the aid of Blue Magic, and this belies their most important function yet; when the Violet Dawn returns and the FOE strike, these are also the people who work most closely with local Cells to rescue the new Generation. They often live lonely lives, but theirs is a sacrifice most necessary for their peers’ survival.

Tech Support:
Another subset - and arguably, the most vital subset - of VU members are the tech support. Their role is to set up and maintain any and all of the technology the organisation relies upon, and their word is considered the best word when it comes to what chatrooms and web forums are - or are not - secure and safe to discuss things on. Unlike Free Agents, Academics, or Bootleggers, this subculture of mages are not strictly speaking any sort of special group or force to be reckoned with - instead, they typically function as part of the regular Cells. They are not held in any particular renown and have no special reputation of their own, but are nonetheless absolutely vital to the function of the group. If the Bootleggers are a body’s blood, then these people are the body’s nerves.

Cam had escaped the curse of the third generation during their awakening, but no debt goes unpaid forever; in the year they were with the Violet Underground, they began to hear voices and see figures beckoning them, claiming to know the truth of the world, claiming that they could show them what lay beneath the thin, dry, paper skin of it all. Cam initially tried to ignore them, but was inevitably pulled deeper and deeper by the increasingly invasive hallucinations. After a while, they became obsessed with the idea that the things they were seeing were in fact other mages – but more specifically, that they were mages from other worlds, or other timelines, where things were different in the past and the present. Whether Cam was right or not, the Violet Underground would not find out until much later, and either way Cam’s hallucinations changed them radically as a person.

They became violently defensive of the narrative they were constructing – that, with the right magic, they could change the course of history, and produce a more favourable Present. They called these other places, with whose denizens they’d spoken, the Histories, and explained that the History they were a part of was merely the surface layer of a world tenfold more complex than they’d ever known – or without magic, ever would know. They began trying to pressure their peers into conducting elaborate, bizarre rituals, with the goal of sending someone into another History, so that they could pull the separate threads of the world together in a more favourable way and re-knit the fabric of reality.

These experiments failed resoundingly, with whoever was sent never returning, or never going anywhere in the first place - and Cam vanished shortly after they started.

In their absence, the Violet Underground’s leading council convened to decide who should provide them direction instead - and they could not decide on an individual at all. To this day the organisation is loosely controlled by a group of five, whose first motion was to call for an end to experimentation with the Histories.

The Violet Underground did not tamper with the fabric of reality again.

At least not until now.

Magic is a complicated and poorly understood thing, but can be observed to follow certain patterns and rules, the foremost of which is the division of Schools by Colour. Each discipline has certain spheres of control and influence, affecting different aspects of the world and – depending on the generation of the mage – affecting different parts of the human mind. Keep in mind, however, that magic cannot affect time travel, and it cannot either create or destroy either matter or energy. It should be noted that the spells you have access to are innate knowledge, something you only realised you already knew when you were Awakened. They are not refined, not necessarily very powerful, and most importantly are not the only magic you will have access to over the course of this game. Your spell choices should be specific abilities rather than general control of the environment, elements, or people, and their effects should similarly be quite specific unless there is a prior agreement with the GM.

Violet Magic

This is magic in its purest, rawest, most alien form. It is inefficient, costly, and draining to use for any real length of time, because it is like a force without direction. The few magicians who have existed long enough to have academic theories about magic have been tossing the idea around that – where magic is concerned – Violet is the colour from which all other colours are derived, but that’s probably nonsense.

In terms of what it can do, Violet magic is primarily used for powering other forms of magic, conducting arcane rituals, or using very basic spells that have no other particular alignment in terms of Colour. Examples of these things would be; powering an enchanted item, conducting a ritual to ward a building or create something new, or attacking another person with raw mana.

Green Magic

Next there is the Domain of Green, which governs the World and Environment, representing such things as naturally occur in the world. This is the discipline that governs natural forces and phenomena, and can be used to conjure electrical energies, set fires, and shape stone. All things that exist have some interaction with the domain of green, even if they do not strictly come under its sphere of control – like animals, which belong both to the Domain of Green and the Domain of Red.

Red Magic

The Domain of Red, in turn, governs all things that change and grow, and represents Vitality and Form. It is the discipline of magic that has the most hold on the physicality of flesh and the flow of blood, and also lays claim to the magic of transmutation. This is the art of the healer, the tool of the surgeon – but also of the alchemist and the shepherd. The Domain of Red is capable of doing harm to living things – but that is not its principal purpose, and it is quite limited in how it could be used for that task. It cannot be used upon the dead.

Blue Magic

The Domain of Blue concerns the sky, space, and the space-between-space. It is the magic of the interstice, and the art by which a Thing may briefly exist in two places at once - it’s original location and a new one - and then cease to exist in the former. It does not concern swirling portals, though ritual forms of Blue magic can provide similar effects, and it does not concern pocket dimensions. The practice of Blue Magic can be rewarding but holds the highest risk; one mis-step can cause irrevocable damage, and the spatial awareness required to concentrate on the destination can be taxing.

White Magic

White Magic involves the careful control of light and dark, in order to affect an immaterial change of appearance or to illuminate (or occlude) an area. It is the discipline that recognises best the value of true sight - or indeed, the value of a clever illusion. It does not, however, concern any mental manipulation or interference with the inner workings of anyone else’s mind. This is the domain of mirages and manipulation of light that, when interpreted by the human eye, makes things seem as though they are different. However when interpreted by the other senses, and under prolonged examination, the veil is usually lifted.

Black Magic

Black magic is not an inherently dark or evil thing, but carries a moral weight that some other colours do not. The Domain of Black is the magic that wraps the heart of your fellow man around your hand like silk strong; it is the discipline that can deprive your peers of their thoughts and replace them with ones of your choosing, the discipline that can convince a man he is holding his lover, when he is clutching a pillow. It is also the Domain that best relieves pain, but is not often used for this. Notably, Black Magic usually focuses either on the deep manipulation of a single person, or comparatively shallow manipulation of larger groups. It requires that you be able to communicate with the sense you are manipulating - within visual range for visual manipulations, earshot for auditory manipulations, and so on - and also that the mind you are manipulating is sapient; this means humans, principally, but arguments can also be made for intelligent animals such as apes, chimpanzees, ravens, and so on. In order to affect an effect, the mind must first reflect, and in so doing being reflected.

History is a curious subject. All our lives we are led to believe that it is simply a recording of the past; an account or set of accounts of events gone by, both recent and long dead. Occasionally you will find that our recording is wrong, and correspondingly we will correct it - but otherwise History seems to be quite fixed.

After all, you cannot change the past.

For what it’s worth, that statement is not incorrect, exactly - it is indeed true that time travel is not possible, even with magic as your ally - but what the collective societal consciousness of humanity has remained blissfully unaware of until now is that there are other Histories, too, where things happened rather differently, and where things may be either less or more real than our own. Opinion is still divided on what exactly these Histories really are - whether they are other world beyond ours, or our own world with a different timeline - and opinion is even further divided on the topic of precisely what manner they co-exist with ours in; are they parallel, contemporary with ours? Are they non-parallel, with time flowing at different rates and in different ways, relatively? Is it the same timeline with fundamental physical differences, or the same physical world with a different past? Are there crossing points where the distance between them narrows, and is that what Hallucination is? What impact are they on dreams, and for whose dreams are they an impact?

And let’s not even get into the theories about why these things exist - for one thing, it’s still not certain that they actually do exist at all; especially since almost everyone who was really into them wound up going horrifically insane, or apparently ceasing to exist entirely.

Like Cam.

All that is certain about the Histories is that they are quite dangerous indeed, and that the Violet Underground is at least broadly against further experimentation.

For now.